Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati on Friday alleged that the Bharatiya Janata Party delayed the urban local body polls in Uttar Pradesh because it focused on “Sangh appeasement”.
“If the intention and policy of the BJP were not to delay the Uttar Pradesh local body election and hold it in a legal manner on time, instead of wasting time in Sangh appeasement by indulging in issues like conversion, hate, jihad and madrasa survey, it would have focused on OBC reservation in the civic polls,” Mayawati was quoted as saying in a statement issued by the BSP.
The Allahabad High Court on December 27 directed the state to hold urban local body polls without providing reservation to members of the Other Backward Classes. The court had quashed a government notification on quotas for OBCs in the polls and said that reservation cannot be provided to them till the conditions mandated in the “triple test” are complied with.
Following the High Court’s order, Chief Minister Adityanath had said that elections will not be held in the state without providing reservation to the OBCs. On Wednesday, the state government appointed a five-member commission to carry out a survey of urban local bodies to assess the political backwardness of the community.
Justice (Retd) Ram Avtar Singh, who heads the panel, has said that it will take six months to conduct the survey. Meanwhile, the Uttar Pradesh government has also moved the Supreme Court against the High Court order.
On Friday, Mayawati also accused the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party of being “anti-reservation parties”.
She claimed that that the two parties have together made the Constitutional right of reservation for uplifting Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes almost inactive and ineffective and were now showing the “same bad, casteist, hostile attitude” towards quota for the OBCs.
“Because of their casteist intentions, thousands of posts reserved for them [SCs, STs and OBCs] in government departments have been lying vacant for years,” she said. “Even the SP’s [Samajwadi Party] thinking, policy and intentions are not right on the issue.”
On Thursday, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav also said that the BJP was against Dalits and the backward classes.
“Today, they have taken the reservation of backward classes, tomorrow they will take away the rights of Dalits,” he claimed.
Yadav demanded that the Uttar Pradesh government convene a special Assembly session to discuss the subject of OBC reservation.
Triple test
In March last year, the Supreme Court, while deciding on the legality of OBC reservations in Maharashtra local body elections, had set out a three-fold test that state governments have to follow to provide the quota.
First, they must set up a dedicated commission to examine backwardness in local bodies within the state. Second, states must determine the size of the quota based on the data collected by the commission.
Third, these reservations, combined with the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes quotas, should not be more than 50% of the total seats in the local body.
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